Perry Zurn

Quite shortly after the Prisons Information Group (GIP) was formed, Michel Foucault delivered a public announcement in which he called for a generalized practice of “active intolerance” against a wide range of disciplinary institutions. Due to three consistent scholarly reductions of the GIP’s legacy, the sense of “active intolerance” remains nebulous at best. Cast, by turns, as merely the offshoot of Foucauldian theory, a point of prison data collection, or a short-lived social movement (forgetting its lengthy successor: the Prisoners Action Committee), the GIP has been regularly interpreted as a relatively circumscribed intellectual enterprise. Against these three reductions, we develop an account of the GIP as an inherently collaborative abolitionist effort that was trained on subjugated knowledges. And this, in fact, is the work of active intolerance.

In this Introduction, we offer, in the first section, a brief sketch of events before turning to track the profound innovations in militancy and theory that Le Group d'information sur les prisons (The Prisons Information Group, the GIP) and its work represent. In the second section, we explore the GIP’s prisoner-centered and largely prisoner-led structure, predicated on the recognition that prisoners have the political knowledge and political agency most relevant to prison resistance movements. In the third section, we trace the GIP’s concomitant reconceptualization of the prison and the intellectual, both of which it embeds in a shared social field of which the former is symptomatic and to which the latter is beholden. In the fourth section, we develop the GIP’s anti-carceral, even abolitionist, legacies implicit within these innovations of militancy and theory, as well as across its archive more generally. Finally, in the fifth section, we close by sketching the GIP archive’s critical reception to date and then carve out new frontiers of interpretive debate in light of contemporary incarceration practices and developments in anti-carceral theory.

There is no denying that the bathroom is a political space. But that is what makes it a space of possibility. As a social-material fixture we use every day, the bathroom has the potential to illuminate, and ultimately to challenge, some of our deepest values and deepest needs. Appreciating the weave of experiences and institutions that have, across time, made the modern bathroom what it is opens up important questions about what it might be. Leaning into the legacy of refusal, we can demand a radical break with logics that have so long masked insidious social hierarchies with calls to order and purity.

It is hardly difficult to imagine writing about critical phenomenology and walking. One might pause over the method of critical phenomenology as a meta-odos, a thinking of the path. Or consider the steps critical phenomenology takes and the unique pitch of its gait as it traverses the borderlands between phenomenology and critical theory. One might query how these two have the capacity to walk so well side by side, so much so that they can become as one, barely distinguishable against an open sky. Such an inquiry would no doubt track how it is that phenomenology walks toward things, through things, into things, suspending the eye of the natural attitude and proceeding ever so carefully and yet bluntly in search of what springs toward it. But such an inquiry would also track how that very process is a scripted processual, notwithstanding all the suspensions upon which it steps. Who and what writes and rewrites the script of what appears, when, and how? What inscriptions define appearances in advance and diaeretically cut them clean from one another? And what are the unscripted forces still at work? Ferreting out the work of scripts and inscriptions, such an inquiry would pause over the hidden structures that constrict what might feel like a free flight of the mind, a bit of unfettered rambling in the fields of consciousness. Thinking critical phenomenology as walking, then, means tracking the two moving in tandem. Phenomenology pulls toward the horizon of experience, while critical theory veers toward structural analyses. Together, they tread a uniquely illuminating path.

Whether in journalism or medicine, education, law, or television, trans writers and trans studies scholars consistently develop this critique of the representational totalization of trans people, whereby they are and have been made whats, not whos; objects, not subjects; voiceless, not vocal; passive, not active; dehistoricized, not historical; and single, not multiple. In what follows, I aim to supplement this critique by attending to the role of curiosity both as a technique of (trans) objectification and as a practice of (trans) freedom, on both the individual and social level. That is, I trace how curiosity—through the monadic and collective acts of gazing, inquiring, investigating, and imagining—functions as part of the project of the representational totalization of trans people but also as part of trans people’s own praxis of resistant de-totalization.

Trans Philosophy: Meaning and Mattering will be the first authoritative collection to establish trans philosophy as a unique field of inquiry. It defines trans philosophy as philosophical work that is accountable to and illuminative of transgender experiences, histories, cultural production, and politics. The book will showcase work from a range of fresh and established voices in this nascent field. It will address a variety of topics (e.g. embodiment, identity, language, law, politics, transphobia), utilize diverse philosophical methods (e.g. analytic, continental, and pluralist; theoretical, experimental, and applied), and attend to significant intersections between trans identity and class, disability, race, and sexuality. Across language and politics, feminism and phenomenology, decolonial theory and disability studies, trans philosophy concerns itself with trans worldmaking in all its excruciating beauty and mundanity.

Given its subject matter, biological psychiatry is uniquely poised to lead STEM DEI initiatives related to disability. Drawing on literatures in science, philosophy, psychiatry, and disability studies, we outline how that leadership might be undertaken. We first review existing opportunities for the advancement of DEI in biological psychiatry around axes of gender and race. We then explore the expansion of biological psychiatry’s DEI efforts to disability, especially along the lines of representation and access, community accountability, first person testimony, and revised theoretical frameworks for pathology. We close with concrete recommendations for scholarship and practice going forward. By tackling head-on the challenge of disability inclusion, biological psychiatry has the opportunity to be a force of transformation in the biological sciences and beyond.

Curious about something? Google it. Look at it. Ask a question. But is curiosity simply information seeking? According to this exhilarating, genre-bending book, what’s left out of the conventional understanding of curiosity are the wandering tracks, the weaving concepts, the knitting of ideas, and the thatching of knowledge systems—the networks, the relations between ideas and between people. Curiosity, say Perry Zurn and Dani Bassett, is a practice of connection: it connects ideas into networks of knowledge, and it connects knowers themselves, both to the knowledge they seek and to each other. Zurn and Bassett—identical twins who write that their book “represents the thought of one mind and two bodies”—harness their respective expertise in the humanities and the sciences to get irrepressibly curious about curiosity. Traipsing across literatures of antiquity and medieval science, Victorian poetry and nature essays, as well as work by writers from a variety of marginalized communities, they trace a multitudinous curiosity. They identify three styles of curiosity—the busybody, who collects stories, creating loose knowledge network; the hunter, who hunts down secrets or discoveries, creating tight networks; and the dancer, who takes leaps of creative imagination, creating loopy ones. Investigating what happens in a curious brain, they offer an accessible account of the network neuroscience of curiosity. And they sketch out a new kind of curiosity-centric and inclusive education that embraces everyone’s curiosity. The book performs the very curiosity that it describes, inviting readers to participate—to be curious with the book and not simply about it.